Last year, I spent two wonderful weeks in Mexico City. It’s a unique and vibrant place. I recorded some of my impressions on this blog. Below is a montage from a multitude of colourful scenes.

The building in the top right hand corner is Mexico’s oldest skyscraper, I believe, famed for surviving the 1985 earthquake undamaged. Which brings us to recent events… My wife spent a decade living in the city. Many of her friends live there still, all of whom have been touched by the terrible consequences of the latest earthquake in the city. Below is an appeal she has made on behalf of the country and its capital.

Dear friends in the UK, Colombia and all over the world. LET’S HELP MEXICO AFTER THE EARTHQUAKE.

There’s a humanitarian crisis everywhere you look, even in our own countries, but today I would like to ask you to put your eyes on México. After the recent earthquakes, many people have died and many others are and will be suffering the consequences of the tragedy in short and long-term. Many people have lost their homes and jobs, and the emotional consequences are huge. But Mexican people are strong and resilient. I know it because I spent some of the most amazing years of my life there. Mexico is my home too and half of my friends live there. I’ve undertaken research into reliable institutions that are receiving monetary donations. Please be assured that your contribution will be in good hands and will serve its purposes. Any contribution will be of great help. If you can’t donate please spread the word or just let Mexican people know that your heart is with them. Any other ideas about how we can help from our homes would be welcome.

If these options don’t work for you, your closest Red Cross Centre can provide further information. Feel free to contact me if you need help related to information in English as some of the information is completely in Spanish, but please have in mind that we don’t belong to any organization, we’re just a small family trying to help the best way we can.

My vast work-in-progress moves ever nearer to completion. The narrator is living in exile. He has been thinking about the sounds he misses from his home country.

Here are the sounds I miss the most: the chatter of the liitraavn in Rezistanzskvaar, the two-stroke clatter of Noorskii-SEATs, the jingling of the signals at pedestrian crossings, the chiming of the bells in Klokksskvaar, the breaking of waves on the Valtikkzii shore, the clunking of the otiis-mekanismis in the Berkmanis department store, the whine of the locomotives’ electromechanical motors, the four-note fugue of the train’s public address system, Tiia’s voice and those of my family, Jovaa and Valeriia, the sound of my own language, its cadence and intonations…

It got me thinking about the exiles I know – and there are quite a few of them – and which sounds they miss the most, or vice-versa, those they don’t.

So I asked my wife, the Colombian illustrator, Catalina Carvajal. It seemed the obvious place to start. And this is what she told me.

Her grandmother’s voice

Aeroplanes flying low overhead on approach to the airport

The prerecorded voice of the tamales-vendor, advertising his wares

The whistle of a mobile sweet-potato oven

Comforting conversation coming from the TV downstairs at her mother’s house in Bogota

The marimbas of street musicians

The sound of departing underground trains on the Mexico City metro

Her friends babbling in the background at a dinner party

The noise of the crowds in downtown Mexico City

The clattering plates and chattering clientele of the cantinas

In the coming weeks, we’ll be hearing from other exiles about the sounds they miss.

Well, we’re in the depths of the English winter here and on most days the temperature struggles to reach double figures. So it seemed timely to cast my mind back to the summer, when I was in North America. I spent the first part of August in Mexico City in the company of my Colombian illustrator. Our wanderings in that city that she knows so well were the inspiration for the dystopian graphic novel that we’re planning to write. So I’m sharing with you some of the things that I saw in that mad and amazing city. The bright, hazy light makes it difficult to take decent photos (well, that’s my excuse, anyway). And it’s an opportunity to prove to the world that my command of the Spanish language still isn’t any greater. An undisclosed prize goes to the first person to guess in which of the buildings the illustrator and I would live.